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The Zuni Pueblo is one of several pueblos in Arizona and New Mexico whose inhabitants are descendants of prosperous and sometimes cliff-dwelling settlements that flourished for millennia,While its exact origin date remains uncertain, Zuni was long established when Spanish conquistadors made contact in 1539. Famously, in 1680, the Zunis — who call themselves A:shiwi (the flesh people) in their language — took part in a larger Pueblo uprising against these notoriously brutal colonizers and had success in the short term. Yet when reinforcements arrived from Europe in 1692, the colonizers encountered diminished resistance, and easily reconquered the region (a historical aporia considered at length in Michael Vincent Wilcox’s The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest (2009)). The images gathered below originally appeared as plates in a paper by Matilda Coxe Stevenson, titled “The Zuñi Indians: Their Mythology, Esoteric Fraternities, and Ceremonies”, for the Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1901–1902. The first woman employed by the Bureau of American Ethnology to study the American Southwest, Stevenson published several works on the Zuni in her lifetime, including Zuñi and the Zuñians (1881), The Religious Life of the Zuñi Child (1887), and The Zuñi Indians (1905).
For U.S. ethnographers at the century’s turn, the Zuni people had become a placeholder for the fantasy of a preserved, indiginous culture, unchanged by settler colonialism. Stevenson writes: “Among the remnants of ancient tribes, the Zuñis, whose extreme exclusiveness has preserved to them their strong individuality, may claim perhaps the highest position”. Yet, as Eliza McFeely argues in Zuni and the American Imagination (2001), Stevenson and her colleagues helped advance the very process whose absence they celebrated: “Zuni was incorporated into the United States not so much by conquerors as by collectors”. Stevenson played an important role in this regard, alongside Frank Hamilton Cushing and Stewart Culin, as the Bureau of American Ethnology made Zuni the subject of its first federally funded anthropological research project.
